Look up the blog posts of virtually any lean-startup or conversion optimization expert on the web, and "talk to your customers" pops up as a recurring theme. Whether you want to optimize your product design, your marketing messages, or your sales copy, 9 out of 10 dentists entrepreneurs agree: Reaching out to your customers is pretty much the smartest way to go about it.

... But what if your startup is so damn new you don't have any customers yet?

... Or what if calling up and pestering strangers is your personal version of Hell?

... Or what if you're just too damn tired/hungover/busy to get on the phone today?

Enter the stealth art of "message mining." Or as I like to think of it ...

Customer Research for Pre-Launch Startups, The Chronically Lazy & The Painfully Shy

But message-mining isn't just for copywriters. Especially when it comes to SaaS products.

Message-mining user reviews of competitor products can an insanely effective way to gather detailed customer feedback on what features your (future) customers love, hate, and need most from a product like yours without ever actually getting on the phone with a human being (although don't get me wrong: you should still eventually get on the phone with users eventually).

What with the sheer number of rich, detailed, organized and even quantified user reviews available on the web for SaaS products these days, you'd be a fool not to embrace the art of message mining as a product designer & developer.

For instance, here's a review I found & used myself while doing messaging research for Respondly back in 2015 (Respondly was snapped up by Buffer shortly after we launched our messaging & copy overhaul. You might recognize it now as Buffer's new "Respond" feature:

(For the record, I also got on the phone with Tony later for an in-depth interview of his experience with Respondly.)

Note that while there are plenty of great snippets of colorful copy in this review that I of course swiped and incorporated into my overhaul at the time, this review also specifically calls out feature-related wants & needs that would be hugely valuable to any startup planning on entering the social media management space.

Gather and analyze a few dozen reviews like this one, and before long you'll see a few bias-busting, assumption-annilating themes taking shape right in front of your eyes. A small handful of specific features & benefits will be mentioned again and again, while others that you thought would be critical will go completely unmentioned.